Organizations are typically interested in obtaining valuable customer insight to assist in development of products and/or services, determine whether customers are satisfied, test advertising concepts and/or website effectiveness, and the like. In some instances, organizations obtain valuable customer insight using surveys and/or other market research techniques. For example, online web-based surveys provide organizations with an efficient environment for quickly reaching their target audience. Web-based surveys can allow organizations to view survey results as they become available. For example, when a respondent completes the survey, the respondent's answers to the questions in the survey can be processed and/or viewed by the organization that solicited the feedback.
Survey hosting sites can provide a central location for survey distribution and can maintain a pool of respondents for responding to the surveys on the site. The surveys hosted on the site may be ranked relative to each other to influence which surveys respondents complete. For example, a respondent may be more likely to respond to a survey that has a high ranking and less likely to respond to a survey that has a low ranking. Typical ranking algorithms rank objects based on popularity. For example, based on a quantity of responses a survey receives or a number of many times a survey is viewed. Such rankings may provide some benefit to respondents by indicating to respondents the surveys that have received the most attention from other respondents. However, popularity based ranking typically does little to provoke discovery of surveys that are less popular, but may be nonetheless of interest to respondents. Furthermore, conventional popularity based survey ranking schemes typical do little to promote surveys based on the survey host's preferences and/or the surveying entities preferences. For example, a host and/or surveying entity may wish to achieve higher survey throughput, encourage popular surveys to complete quickly, emphasize specific surveys, and/or highlight surveys that lag behind other surveys especially if the surveys are nearing expiration.